Social, cognitive, and physiological aspects of humour perception from 4 to 8 months: Two longitudinal studies

Mireault, Gina C.; Crockenberg, Susan; Heilman, Keri J.; Sparrow, John E.; Cousineau, Kassandra; Rainville, Brady

doi:10.1111/bjdp.12216

Cited by 49 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Presumably she had long-term memory for the original tempo, perhaps finding the altered versions amusing or exciting, as reflected in increased smiling during the altered versions. Just as younger infants perceive absurd versions of familiar events as humorous (Mireault et al, 2018), older infants may react with heightened excitement when their expectations of highly familiar music are violated. Musical tempo may be most memorable for music with a highly salient bass line or pulse and least memorable for music with a less salient bass line and more salient melody line.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dancing to Metallica and Dora: Case Study of a 19-Month-Old

Cirelli

Trehub

2019

Front. Psychol.

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Rhythmic movement to music, whether deliberate (e.g., dancing) or inadvertent (e.g., foot-tapping), is ubiquitous. Although parents commonly report that infants move rhythmically to music, especially to familiar music in familiar environments, there has been little systematic study of this behavior. As a preliminary exploration of infants' movement to music in their home environment, we studied V, an infant who began moving rhythmically to music at 6 months of age. Our primary goal was to generate testable hypotheses about movement to music in infancy. Across nine sessions, beginning when V was almost 19 months of age and ending 8 weeks later, she was video-recorded by her mother during the presentation of 60-s excerpts from two familiar and two unfamiliar songs presented at three tempos—the original song tempo as well as faster and slower versions. V exhibited a number of repeated dance movements such as head-bobbing, arm-pumping, torso twists, and bouncing. She danced most to Metallica's Now that We're Dead , a recording that her father played daily in V's presence, often dancing with her while it played. Its high pulse clarity, in conjunction with familiarity, may have increased V's propensity to dance, as reflected in lesser dancing to familiar music with low pulse clarity and to unfamiliar music with high pulse clarity. V moved faster to faster music but only for unfamiliar music, perhaps because arousal drove her movement to familiar music. Her movement to music was positively correlated with smiling, highlighting the pleasurable nature of the experience. Rhythmic movement to music may have enhanced her pleasure, and the joy of listening may have promoted her movement. On the basis of behavior observed in this case study, we propose a scaled-up study to obtain definitive evidence about the effects of song familiarity and specific musical features on infant rhythmic movement, the developmental trajectory of dance skills, and the typical range of variation in such skills.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dancing to Metallica and Dora: Case Study of a 19-Month-Old

Cirelli

Trehub

2019

Front. Psychol.

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“…and thus do not provide as stable a metric as smiling and laughing. However, looking times have confirmed infants' ability to detect these social and behavioral incongruities, with 6-month-olds taking longer to look away, for example, although 4-month-olds do not differ significantly in their looking times (Mireault et al, 2018). Since infants smile and laugh at such incongruities beginning at 5 months, researchers have applied the same inference used in the VOE literature (Walden et al, 2007) interpreting infants' detection of and reaction to incongruity to mean that they have some knowledge regarding social norms.…”

Section: Humorous Incongruitiesmentioning

confidence: 93%

“…Habituation trials are not required since the events and objects are within the ordinary experience of infants and because the randomized, repeatedmeasures design controls for extraneous variables that might affect infants' responses. These experiments generally adhere to the technique as described by Mireault, Crockenberg, Heilman, Sparrow, Cousineau, & Rainville (2018):…”

Section: Humorous Incongruitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To know whether infants detect a difference between incongruous and ordinary events, researchers focus on infants' rates of smiling and laughing, although they also measure looking times. Such studies, which tend to occur under naturalistic conditions in infants' homes, have consistently shown that infants as young as 5 months smile and laugh more at incongruous events, indicating that they have detected the incongruity (Mireault et al, 2018;Sroufe & Wunsch, 1972). Since they smile and laugh towards the incongruous events even when parents are emotionally neutral, infants are not simply mimicking parental laughter or relying on parental affect to interpret the incongruity as amusing.…”

Section: Humorous Incongruitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Another is that repetition may help infants understand the intentionality of the behavior, a feature necessary for perceiving a joke (Hoicka & Gattis, 2008). Research suggests that young infants may be able to infer others' intentions based on repetition (Gergely & Csibra, 2003;Gergely, Nádasdy, Csibra, & Biró, 1995;Mireault et al, 2018;Tauzin & Gergely, 2018). Repetition could also offer infants in these situations a preparedness, a readiness-to-interact and a readiness for emotional participation with others (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2012) that allows for easier grasping of the incongruity.…”

Section: Repetition and Duration Of Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Making Sense of Infants’ Differential Responses to Incongruity

Mireault

Reddy

2020

Human Development

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Infants show strikingly different reactions to incongruity: looking or smiling. The former occurs in response to magical events and the latter to humorous events. We argue that these reactions depend largely on the respective experimental methodologies employed, including the popular violation of expectation (VOE) paradigm. Although both types of studies involve infants’ reactions to incongruity, their literatures have yet to confront each other, and researchers in each domain are drawing strikingly different conclusions regarding infants’ understanding of the world. Here, we argue that infants are sensitive to and constrained by several contextual differences in the methodologies employed by incongruity researchers that afford one or the other reaction. We apply De Jaegher and Di Paolo’s participatory sense-making framework to further understand what infants are sensitive to in these paradigms. Understanding infants’ reactions to incongruity (i.e., VOE) is necessary to clear up claims regarding the sophistication of their knowledge of physical and social phenomena. Attention to several simple methodological details is recommended.

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Physiological measurement of emotion from infancy to preschool: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

et al. 2020

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Introduction Emotion regulation, the ability to regulate emotional responses to environmental stimuli, develops in the first years of life and plays an important role in the development of personality, social competence, and behavior. Substantial literature suggests a relationship between emotion regulation and cardiac physiology; specifically, heart rate changes in response to positive or negative emotion‐eliciting stimuli. Method This systematic review and meta‐analysis provide an in‐depth examination of research that has measured physiological responding during emotional‐evoking tasks in children from birth to 4 years of age. Results The review had three main findings. First, meta‐regressions resulted in an age‐related decrease in baseline and task‐related heart rate (HR) and increases in baseline and task‐related respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA). Second, meta‐analyses suggest task‐related increases in HR and decreases in RSA and heart rate variability (HRV), regardless of emotional valence of the task. Third, associations between physiological responding and observed behavioral regulation are not consistently present in children aged 4 and younger. The review also provides a summary of the various methodology used to measure physiological reactions to emotional‐evoking tasks, including number of sensors used and placement, various baseline and emotional‐evoking tasks used, methods for extracting RSA, as well as percentage of loss and reasons for loss for each study. Conclusion Characterizing the physiological reactivity of typically developing children is important to understanding the role emotional regulation plays in typical and atypical development.

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Social, cognitive, and physiological aspects of humour perception from 4 to 8 months: Two longitudinal studies

Cited by 49 publications

References 37 publications

Dancing to Metallica and Dora: Case Study of a 19-Month-Old

Dancing to Metallica and Dora: Case Study of a 19-Month-Old

Making Sense of Infants’ Differential Responses to Incongruity

Physiological measurement of emotion from infancy to preschool: A systematic review and meta‐analysis

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